Defying international political pressure, Pakistan set off five underground nuclear tests Thursday and warned India it was topping a long-range missile with an atomic warhead, fueling concerns of a nuclear arms race on the subcontinent between adversaries who have been to war three times since 1947.
A U.S. official, who asked not to be identified, said Thursday in Washington that Pakistan was preparing for another possible nuclear test.
“We have indications that they are working at a second site for a possible additional test. We are monitoring it carefully. They could be in a position to conduct a test in the next couple of days,” the official said. But early Friday, a Pakistani official said no further tests were scheduled.
Although Thursday’s tests drew condemnation from around the world, they were cast by the Pakistani government as a measured response to India’s own round of five underground nuclear tests just two weeks ago. The new tests came in the wake of repeated requests to Islamabad from President Clinton and other world leaders to forsake nuclear competition.
“Today we have settled the score with India,” said Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
A Pakistani government statement said Pakistan’s Ghauri missile, test-fired on April 6, was “already being capped with nuclear warheads to give a befitting reply to any misadventure by the enemy,” meaning India.
In Washington, Clinton said the United States had no choice but to impose sanctions on Pakistan immediately.
He said he deplored the decision to test the weapons, adding that Islamabad had wasted a “truly priceless opportunity” to receive U.S. economic and security assistance.
Clinton was joined by leaders from around the world who expressed their concern that the religious, ethnic and nationalistic disagreements that have long given the region a hair trigger could easily escalate a conflict into a nuclear confrontation.
“It is now more urgent than it was yesterday that both Pakistan and India renounce further tests, sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and take decisive steps to reduce tensions in South Asia and reverse the dangerous arms race,” Clinton said.
Sharif said Pakistan took its action because the economic sanctions against India imposed by the international community failed to adequately punish India after its nuclear tests. He called India “an expansionist power.”
“We could not have remained complacent about the threats to our security. We could not have ignored the magnitude of the threat . . . Our decision to exercise our nuclear option has been taken in the interest of national self-defense,” Sharif said.
The tests were carried out at a testing range in the Chagai Hills, a desert region in remote Pakistan, close to the borders with Afghanistan and Iran.
Sharif had agonized over the decision to react to India’s tests because of the condemnations it would bring, the escalation of tensions and the threat it presented to substantial foreign aid that an impoverished Islamabad depends upon to balance its budget and push a variety of economic programs.
But the question of sanctions as punishment became muddied after the relatively mild reaction from the world community to India’s test. The U.S. and a few other nations, Japan among them, imposed sanctions, but most leaders opted for tough talk and no action.
“We will have sanctions. We will have difficulties. But if you have the strength, there is no way we can fail,” Sharif said in a nationally televised address, noting that the government has already taken austerity measures to save money.
“I give you this assurance,” he said. “If the nation will only take one meal a day, then my children will only take one meal a day. . . . Your government is with you.”
Pakistani President Rafiq Tarar declared a state of emergency, suspending the nation’s constitution and civil rights and giving the government extraordinary powers. The announcement cited “the threat by the external aggression to the security of Pakistan.”
The terse announcement, carried by the state-run news agency, did not identify who the aggressor might be, but Pakistan has accused India of threatening to attack its nuclear installations.
India dismissed the allegations. “Our prime minister has said again and again over the last few days that these reports are ridiculous,” said K.C. Singh, spokesman for India’s External Affairs Ministry.
There were celebrations in the streets of towns all over Pakistan. Men fired pistols and rifles into the air and gave one another sweet meats, candies and cookies as presents.
“Let them impose sanctions. We don’t care,” said a shopkeeper in Karachi. “Pakistan is a nuclear power now. We are not a nation of cowards. We cannot take the atomic tests by India’s Hindus lying down.”
In New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said the Pakistani tests were “vindication” for India’s own nuclear experiments and might prompt the government to reconsider its decision not to conduct any more tests.
“They have vindicated our policy. They have confirmed our doubts,” he said. “India is ready to meet any challenge.”
Pakistan is likely to face the same kind of sanctions as India in the wake of its nuclear tests, although any cuts in foreign finance or funding are likely to weigh much more heavily on Pakistan, a less prosperous nation than India.
Pakistan’s per capita income is only $400 a year, and its annual budget of $13 billion is only about one-third of what the state of Illinois spends. Some $4 billion of that amount is spent on the military, which is a distant and deeply insecure second in the conventional arms race with India.
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If the United States can persuade its allies to join in sanctions, Pakistan could lose billions of dollars from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which have played central roles in helping the nation’s effort to improve the standard of living.
But none of the money is in jeopardy now, and Washington would have to build a coalition to impose broad financial sanctions.
The tests raise larger concerns about nuclear proliferation in the region, along with questions about what the big nuclear powers–the United States being the biggest–can do about it.
Although China was among the first nations to condemn Pakistan’s tests, it has had a major role in helping Pakistan build up its military forces and undoubtedly will side politically with Islamabad in any regional squabbles.
There is also a sense that one of the key barricades in the world of the nuclear “have’s”–national wealth as a measure of access to atomic weapons–has been breached. An apparent have-not has now stomped into the nuclear camp. The fear is that the nuclear picture in India and Pakistan may be a snapshot of future small-budget nuclear competitions.
Arms control experts across the industrialized world worried about what might happen if Iran and Iraq take the fateful step to develop and test nuclear weapons. This would raise serious questions about how Israel, long believed to be in the nuclear camp, would respond.
The emotional tone of Sharif’s speech reflected the bitter intensity of Pakistan’s relations with India. The two nations were born in the religious and ethnic fighting that scarred colonial India as it was pursuing its independence from Britain. That battle left two disparate nations–predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.
The current flash point for their problems is the disputed and divided territory of Kashmir. Two of their three wars were fought over the province. Even as the nations pursued their atomic experiments, soldiers from both sides lobbed conventional artillery shells and fired small arms at one another along the contested Kashmir border.
Developing a nuclear capability has been on Pakistan’s agenda since 1974, when India exploded its first nuclear device. Then Prime-Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto vowed the people of Pakistan would “eat grass” if necessary to build a nuclear weapons capability. He promised there would be a Muslim nuclear power in the world, and Pakistan would be at its center.
There were a few false starts as the world community gradually cut off access to key technology in an attempt to limit the Pakistani weapons program, but Islamabad announced as early as 1984 that it had the capacity to build atomic and hydrogen bombs.
Despite its initial strong opposition to Pakistan’s nuclear program, the United States found its own role changing in the 1970s after the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Pakistan became the staging area for an array of Western military and financial support that flowed to the rebels fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan.
Once communism collapsed, that relationship changed again. By 1990, the United States was so suspicious about Pakistan’s home-grown nuclear program that it stopped all military aid and closed the gate on any new economic assistance.
Tribune foreign correspondent Michael A. Lev reported this account from Srinagar, India, and staff writer Charles M. Madigan from Chicago. Tribune special correspondent Anwar Iqbal reported from Islamabad, Pakistan, with Tribune news services.
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